Category: Public Health

By an Anonymous Historian I love looking up archaic uses of words and uncovering their etymologies. Researching the origins of the word ‘abuse’, I was struck by how the meaning of abuse has journeyed alongside sexuality and reproduction for centuries. ab – uti The Vulgar Latin abuti meant use up or consume as well as […]

The RSC’s new gender-flipped production of The Taming of the Shrew highlights the often overlooked coercive and controlling behaviour in the script. Gender Rewriting male characters as female can be done without changing much at all, as in the production of Timon of Athens at the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) earlier this year, where the […]

By Annabel Sowemimo Many times a week when I grab hold of a ‘Sims’ speculum (used in gynecology theatres across the world) I feel a shudder as I think of the legacy of J.Marion Sims, often nicknamed “the father of Gynaecology”. We can thank the many nameless Black American and poor women that Sims operated […]

By Dr Sue Mann. Re-published with permission of FSRH. Dr Sue Mann and colleagues Monica Davison and Alison Hadley provide some background to the new suite of documents on reproductive health to be published by Public Health England (PHE). The documents will define the scope of reproductive health, provide a national overview of the current status […]

By Katherine Ripullone and Kate Womersley From 2019, the NHS will refuse hundreds of thousands of operations, as part of cost-cutting measures. What’s been less well publicized than the ‘17 blacklisted ops’, is how restriction and discontinuation of these procedures by NHS England will disproportionately affect women. This gender bias is not a new trend. […]

Linda Pepper is the new patient editor at BMJ SRH. She has been a lay member of RCOG Women’s Network (WN) for 6 years, represented the WN on the Faculty of Sexual and Reproductive Health council and is a lay examiner and assessor for RCOG membership exams. She has dedicated her career to NHS patient […]

This week, transgender patients have been encouraged by NHS England to enroll themselves in screening programs suited to their physiological sex, rather than their preferred gender. Currently in the UK patients are invited to sex-specific screening programmes (breast cancer, cervical cancer, abdominal aortic aneurysm) by their GP according to their registered gender. For many trans people, this is […]

(and so are early menopause, pregnancy complications and hysterectomy) Women who started their period before the age of 12 have an increased risk of heart disease and stroke in later life, suggests a study published in Heart today. Early menarche is one of several reproductive risk factors (as well as early menopause, pregnancy complications and […]

Abigail Aiken trained in clinical medicine at the University of Cambridge, before completing an MPH at Harvard School of Public Health, a PhD in public policy at the University of Texas at Austin, and a post-doc at the Office of Population Research at Princeton. She is now assistant professor at the LBJ School of Public […]

Abigail Aiken trained in clinical medicine at the University of Cambridge, before completing an MPH at Harvard School of Public Health, a PhD in public policy at the University of Texas at Austin, and a post-doc at the Office of Population Research at Princeton. She is now assistant professor at the LBJ School of Public […]